On the jacket of "Swimming Across," Andy Grove's new memoir of his childhood in Hungary and his migration to America, Tom Brokaw writes that the book "should be required reading in schools."

I'm not prepared to go that far, considering all the other important books our kids don't get to read because our schools no longer allow anything but drilling for standardized tests.

Still, "Swimming Across" is an inspiring story and a terrific read. Grove's previous book, "Only the Paranoid Survive," was a best-seller in the celebrity executive's advice category, and his first title, "Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices," remains in print almost 35 years after its original publication. But his latest effort is sure to appeal to a much wider audience.

Grove, of course, co-founded Intel, the company that invented the microprocessor -- the device that made the PC possible. He was its chief executive officer from 1987 until 1998 -- a decade of astonishing growth, technical achievement and prosperity for the company -- and remains its chairman.

But "Swimming Across" says nothing directly about Grove's career in high tech. In fact, it ends with his first months in the United States after his arrival in New York in 1957, years before he had even heard the word "transistor." The mystique of American technology was part of what brought him here, he writes, but to him that mostly meant our big cars, he told me.

Most of the book's 290 pages are devoted to his memories of life in Hungary,

beginning in September 1939 when he turned 3 as World War II was breaking out,

and ending in December 1956, when he slipped across the border into Austria after Soviet tanks had rolled into his beloved Budapest to crush a burgeoning popular movement for democracy and national independence.

Much of "Swimming Across" is about the ordinary pleasures and pressures of childhood -- playing with a toy lion, learning to swim, devouring cowboy novels, resisting piano lessons, coping with teasing (for a few post-war years classmates nicknamed Grove "Fatso"), discovering sexual attraction.

There's a severe illness in the story -- a bout with scarlet fever that kept him bedridden for 10 months and cost him half his hearing -- plus a broken arm and an ice-cream-soothed tonsillectomy. There's even a fair bit of misbehavior -- shoplifting candy, inadvertently hitting a streetcar driver with a snowball, peeing down a stairwell for the fun of it.

And we see Grove contending with teachers who marked him down for being "too lively," developing an interest in science -- specifically, in chemistry, the field in which he was to earn his degrees. Gradually, he emerges as an academic star, acing problems in a first-year college exam that no undergraduate had ever before solved.

What gives the book its power, though, is that this fairly ordinary story unfolds against an extraordinary historical backdrop. Born into a non- religious Jewish family, the young Grove watched and worried as a right-wing Hungarian dictatorship and later an occupying Nazi army imposed an ever- tightening web of anti-Semitic restrictions on the country.

He and his mother were forced out of their apartment and forced to wear the Star of David on their clothes. (His father spent four years in a labor battalion on the Soviet front.) Eventually he was sent into hiding, under a false identity, with gentile acquaintances in the countryside.

Dodging questions about the catechism and learning to urinate without letting playmates catch a glimpse of his circumcised penis, he managed to survive until the Red Army, fighting house to house and street to street, finally pushed the Nazis out of the country in early 1945. Most of Hungary's 650,000 prewar Jews weren't so lucky.

The Soviet occupation and the years of Stalinist rule that followed brought new dangers. His mother was raped by a Russian soldier. His family's modest dairy business was nationalized.

His father, back from the front, was first put in charge of a state animal- breeding enterprise -- a field he knew little about -- then denounced and fired for relying too heavily on bourgeois experts. Relatives were hauled off to prison in the middle of the night for imagined political offenses.

Stalin died in 1953, when Grove was 16, and in Hungary a thaw set in soon after. It culminated in the fall of 1956, when the people of Budapest took to the streets. Grove, by then in his second year at the university, joined a huge peaceful march early in the uprising, but headed for home when excited crowds began to take over government buildings and toppled a giant statue of Stalin.

A few days later, the Soviets blasted their way back into Budapest, and Grove and his parents were again hiding in a coal cellar as artillery shells exploded overhead. After a period of hesitation, Grove decided to heed the advice of an aunt, an Auschwitz survivor, and join the tens of thousands of mostly young Hungarians making a dash for Austria and freedom.

Once he reached Vienna, Grove devoted himself to trying to get a visa to this country. He was initially turned down because, he writes, he was the only applicant who said no when the screening committee asked if he had fought the Russians.

But he persisted, and a day later he prevailed upon another set of interviewers to approve his application -- partly because he had relatives ready to take him in in New York, partly because he spoke more English than most of the other applicants, but mostly, it seemed, because of his sheer force of will.

Within weeks, after a trip across the stormy North Atlantic on a troop carrier packed with seasick refugees, Grove reached New York. Upon arrival, he writes in a passage that's particularly poignant post-Sept. 11, "We stood in silence and just stared. I thought, 'These houses have not heard bombs or artillery, not ever.' I marveled at this."

Grove tells his tumultuous tale in a spare, almost matter-of-fact voice. He has a sharp eye for the revealing detail, but keeps his emotions to himself, and beyond the facts he presents, he offers little by way of analysis of the upheavals he lived through.

Perhaps because I have a personal interest in the modern history of Eastern Europe, I found this approach a little frustrating at times -- I wanted to hear not just what he remembers, but how he interprets his experience and what lessons -- about politics, about culture, about the human psyche -- he has drawn from it.

But Grove is not a historian, and that was not the book he chose to write. The approach he adopted -- with help from his wife, Eva, and several editors, including Time Inc.'s editor in chief, Norman Pearlstine -- certainly makes for a story that's as accessible as it is uplifting. It would make a great gift for almost anyone on your holiday list -- techie or not.